---Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.MiquelFire.red | +MeWindows 8 is a toned, stylish, polished professional athlete. But it’s wearing clown makeup, and that creates a serious image problem. ~PCWorld Article

There is no single person or group of people that deserves to lead a country. If you want a true democracy then you should have people from all sides having a reasonable say in how to do things. All of our so called "democracies" are every bit as fixed as a monarch or dictatorship. We just get to pat ourselves on the back and pretend we're free to make us feel better.

In Finland we used to vote electors to vote for the president. But what the citizen did was voting for an individual elector, not for the president. Though one could vote only for an elector candidate from one's own district. And each district had a proportional amount of electors to be elected. The system worked pretty well, though we went to a far more democratic system by skipping the electors altogether and let the citizens vote directly on the president.

But at the mean time the power of the president has been reduced very much, in favour of the prime minister. Which is stupid, because the prime minister doesn't get the mandate directly from the people, but from the party that wins the general election.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Years of thorough research have revealed that the red "x" that closes a window, really isn't red, but white on red background.

Years of thorough research have revealed that what people find beautiful about the Mandelbrot set is not the set itself, but all the rest.

All of our so called "democracies" are every bit as fixed as a monarch or dictatorship.

I don't think it's quite that bad. We do at least have popular votes which, broken as they are, will oust particularly bad politicians. Under a dictatorship, you would not get away with complaining here.

Err I mean... let me just post here to keep the thread going because what I just wrote is a waste of time

The first past the post system works well when there are many minority parties and minority governments. Historically there have been more parties in Canada, and the system is designed to work under those circumstances. However, in more recent decades there have been only 4 main parties, and the green party is just barely hanging on.

Parts of the system are being taken advantage of to create majority governments, and we end up inching closer to the 2 party system of the United States.

The people even voted to keep the first past the post system in a referendum. The referendum was created through a non-profit, costing lots of money raised by the people. The media was super against it, and it failed.

IMHO the election systems in UK and USA are crap. It leads to an over-emphasis of minor differences, to the point that nations get more divided than they actually are. The coalition system in most European nations leads to more consensus and compromise and more centrist candidates.

Fundamentally, a single vote doesn't have much of an impact. Voting (and what you are allowed to vote for) only represents a small margin of the bigger overall picture of how individuals are allowed to shape their world.

Money is a lot more impactful. The real influencers in the day to day world are the voices with money. Someone with wealth is a lot more attractive to businesses, and so services cater to them and their world view. Poor individuals have little to nothing to offer businesses, and so market forces fundamentally ignore them.

On the plus side, a vote gives this neglected class an opportunity to offset the balance of reality. That's really cool, to be honest. However, I feel that a "truer" democracy might find some way to give everyone equal wealth, allowing all classes to equally express themselves economically.

What on earth would a system be like, where a single vote would have an impact?

You vote A. 30% vote A. 70% vote B. B wins. But by voting, you have stated that you belong to a minority supporting A and you are simply surrounded by a majority supporting B. Of course there should be no way for you as a single person to put A in the place of the winner.

Every time I vote, I do have a feeling that my vote has an impact. On myself! And besides, there are absolute no one else, whose vote would have a greater impact than my vote.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Years of thorough research have revealed that the red "x" that closes a window, really isn't red, but white on red background.

Years of thorough research have revealed that what people find beautiful about the Mandelbrot set is not the set itself, but all the rest.

You vote A. 30% vote A. 70% vote B. B wins. But by voting, you have stated that you belong to a minority supporting A and you are simply surrounded by a majority supporting B. Of course there should be no way for you as a single person to put A in the place of the winner.

And you would expect a bill that has 70% of the population's support to pass about 70% of the time, but it has the same chance of passing (~30%) regardless of support.

Yet if the bill has 70% support from the top 10%, it has about an equal chance of passing.

The will of the people is not reflected in the will of the government. And therefore, voting has no effect, even for the entire population.

(The numbers may be off; I'm going off memory. It's only relevant for the United States. Citation and more.)

The same happened in the UK, there was a referendum to change the voting system... and it was soundly rejected.

I witnessed rich, Conservatives-leaning, people vote against that because they liked the fact that the Conservatives were able to get in thanks to flaws in the system. Meanwhile there was a massive smear campaign (no doubt funded by those people) to make everyone think other voting systems were a bad idea. Finally, it's worth noting that the proposed replacement system was still not the best one available, by far (there are more CGP Grey videos on this if anyone's interested).

It's a good video, but a lot of what he says is a bit presumptive. A real world model instead of his hypothetical animal kingdom would be nice. I did reach the same conclusion (two party system), so I'm not completely out of line.

But I would say it only works well if you start with two options. When you have any more than that, a big problem is that no one can accurately express ideas like "Anyone except X" - they might want Y, but they'd be happy with Z, and then X gets in because the Y-or-Z supporters are diluted.

But it looks as if we did agree on how it converges to there only being two serious contenders